Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

i always thought they should make poh a raid-wide ability.

my thought :

-keep the cast time/no cd
-keep a high mana cost (48% base mana atm, which is fine already imo)
-have poh heal always its main target, and heal 2 group of target + 2 raid players within 40y with lowest health, that should do the trick somehow even though i can imagine the brainstorming in order to code that
-maybe lower its scaling a bit

these changes could keep coh competitive as a skill to use on every cd possible.

more than poh, i'd rahter see holy nova get raid-wide anyway ;D
who said OP?

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Originally Posted by zito

If I am in a 10 man raid as a disc priest and group 1 has 3 people who have taken damage and group 2 has 3 people taken damage I wil have to cast 2 PoH to aoe heal them all which is not needed AND NOT FUN. TBH I think you are being sarcastic are just trying to pick a fight.

If PoH becomes an smart heal priests will return to the beggining of the Wrath of the Lick King, when we were mindless spamming Circle of Healing. This situation was unchallenging, boring and stupid, and we both know how the story conitnues, Prayer will need a cooldown or a huge mana cost to fix it.

If they put a cooldown on Prayer of Healing we will use evertime the spell is up, why? Because a spell that heals 5 players with the only restriction of a 36yd is always useful. Healing is about choosing the correct spell for each situation, not about pushing a spell everytime is ready.

And if Blizzard increases Prayer's mana cost the spell will be more situational than the current one with its party restriction.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

How about basically keeping it as it is today as non smart heal but instead of healing based on group selected you choose
an area? You get a targeting circle like mass dispel and when you've set your area the casting starts so you don't need to set it and then start casting. The area could light up like holy fire ring to remind DPS / Melee / Whomever to move their lazy ass and get into the circle. When it goes off everyone within that circle would be healed. You can pre-plan for incoming raid at a certain location, it would no longer be group restricted and it would be a non-smart heal. Thoughts?

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Originally Posted by Zoros

If PoH becomes an smart heal priests will return to the beggining of the Wrath of the Lick King, when we were mindless spamming Circle of Healing. This situation was unchallenging, boring and stupid, and we both know how the story conitnues, Prayer will need a cooldown or a huge mana cost to fix it.

If they put a cooldown on Prayer of Healing we will use evertime the spell is up, why? Because a spell that heals 5 players with the only restriction of a 36yd is always useful. Healing is about choosing the correct spell for each situation, not about pushing a spell everytime is ready.

And if Blizzard increases Prayer's mana cost the spell will be more situational than the current one with its party restriction.

Smart heals are boring, I like to know who I'm healing.

Well, Prayer of Healing already has a huge mana cost, most people just don't tend to care these days.
Adding a huge mana cost or a cooldown are definitely not the only ways to fix this spell for Cataclysm.
They already said that they will be changing all party-wide heals like Tranquility to raid-wide.
If they put a cooldown on Prayer of Healing, any smart Priest *wouldn't* use it every time it is up as you suggest. Why waste a huge amount of mana when hardly anyone needs healing?

I would say the best idea for it would be to reduce the range on the AoE of the heal, so instead of healing everyone within 30 feet of the target, it could be a smart heal which heals players within 15 or 10. Then you have to actually look at where people are grouped and taking damage to use it effectively.

I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Phillie I really like your suggestion. It might not be the most useful spell that way, but at least i find it really interesting (: But overall it would prob cause too much trouble, can't be sure though.

Edit: That is actually just about shamans new Rain of Healing is going to be, so prob a bad idea.. looking forward to heal on my shaman then xD

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

If they put a cooldown on Prayer of Healing, any smart Priest *wouldn't* use it every time it is up as you suggest. Why waste a huge amount of mana when hardly anyone needs healing?

From my point of view we are nearly using Circle of Healing everytime the cooldown is up. If Circle is not the best option when it's available it is the best option two seconds later. Exaggerating a bit, Circle makes priest gameplay more rotational than interactive. I'm not complaining about Circle spell, just saying that another version of it could make holy priest gameplay boring and unchallenging.

Besides in Cataclysm we will return to Burning Crusade situation when it was impossible to see everybody at 100%, so Prayer of Healing will be always useful, even overpowered.

Originally Posted by Abandon

I would say the best idea for it would be to reduce the range on the AoE of the heal, so instead of healing everyone within 30 feet of the target, it could be a smart heal which heals players within 15 or 10. Then you have to actually look at where people are grouped and taking damage to use it effectively.

I play small battlegrounds with the shift+v option, I prefer to look the battle instead of looking health bars in the left part of our screen. Mechanics like the one you are suggesting that interact with what is happening in our screens are funnier than the ones that only cares about health bars. However I prefer to look health bars that pushing spells everytime its cooldown is up. Besides the current shift+v option is too precarious.

From my point of view spell niches make our gameplay interactive, and short cooldowns make our gameplay rotational. If a healing spell is the best option to cast everytime its cooldown is up we have a problem. That is already happening with Circle. We are using Binding Heal when is necessary, but we are using Circle everytime the cooldown is up because it's always necessary. For what we know about Cataclysm it will be the same situation for an smart version of Prayer of Healing, so we will change a problem for another one, instead of looking green bars we will use a spell everytime is ready.

In my opinion a huge mana cost doesn't fix anything, it would frustrate priests when they don't have mana, or make priests overpowered when they have enough mana.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Originally Posted by Zoros

From my point of view we are nearly using Circle of Healing everytime the cooldown is up. If Circle is not the best option when it's available it is the best option two seconds later. Exaggerating a bit, Circle makes priest gameplay more rotational than interactive. I'm not complaining about Circle spell, just saying that another version of it could make holy priest gameplay boring and unchallenging.

Besides in Cataclysm we will return to Burning Crusade situation when it was impossible to see everybody at 100%, so Prayer of Healing will be always useful, even overpowered.

Circle of healing is instant, can proc instant free Flash Heals and doesn't cost a lot of mana. There isn't really any punishment for using it every cooldown apart from not having it for six seconds. However, if you are casting Prayer of Healing whenever you can, you are going to go out of mana. That's already true now, and will be more true when we have to actually watch our mana. I don't really like the idea of a cooldown mainly because it feels restrictive. I would prefer a restriction that is more dynamic and which you can work around, like a shorter range on the AoE heal around the target.

I play small battlegrounds with the shift+v option, I prefer to look the battle instead of looking health bars in the left part of our screen. Mechanics like the one you are suggesting that interact with what is happening in our screens are funnier than the ones that only cares about health bars. However I prefer to look health bars that pushing spells everytime its cooldown is up. Besides the current shift+v option is too precarious.

This is something I have seen a lot from the new developer notes. Almost every class got a new skill that requires you to actually look at the game to use it well, not just the UI. Leap of Faith, Healing Rain, Wild Mushroom, Smoke Bomb, Healing Hands, ect all require positioning to use, so I would't be surprised if they change Prayer of Healing to be similar.

From my point of view spell niches make our gameplay interactive, and short cooldowns make our gameplay rotational. If a healing spell is the best option to cast everytime its cooldown is up we have a problem. That is already happening with Circle. We are using Binding Heal when is necessary, but we are using Circle everytime the cooldown is up because it's always necessary. For what we know about Cataclysm it will be the same situation for an smart version of Prayer of Healing, so we will change a problem for another one, instead of looking green bars we will use a spell everytime is ready.

In my opinion a huge mana cost doesn't fix anything, it would frustrate priests when they don't have mana, or make priests overpowered when they have enough mana.

Hopefully they will come up with a more elegant solution than just making it incredibly expensive or adding a cooldown, but I don't really see the mana cost being lowered. I suppose we will have to wait until they announce more details on the change.

I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Okay, I think I've come up with a solution. Let's run on the assumption that groups within a raid will be a thing of the past; instead we'll essentially have 1 giant group of 25. As such, I think there's a way to keep generally the feel of Prayer of Healing as it is now without making it smart and actually allowing for even more intelligent decision making on the part of the Priest.

As of now, I often have to bug the raid leader to move people between groups to maximize the use of PoH on specific fights, much like Spiritus mentioned upthread. What if, once groups are meaningless, they added some UI element that let us make private groups that only the Priest can see, they default to be pretty much random but the Priest can move people around as he sees fit, the only caveat being that they cannot be changed while in combat. Then, Prayer essentially works as it does now, except it's limited by these private groups instead of actual groups. I imagine, though, that it should still be more cost prohibitive than it is now.

In fact, there's other interesting set-ups to this sort of benefit. Imagine if these groups weren't necessarily forced to be 5 groups of 5, but instead you had to have a certain number based on the size of the raid (let's go with n/5, to keep it similar to now), but you could potentially have a few less in some groups (say a minimum number of 3-4) and could have a few more in other groups (say a maximum number of 6-7) and the total healing is divided equally over those in the group. This could give us something akin to a beacon in some cases (though slower and cost prohibitive) and allow us to make some small adjustments based on raid make-up (say we have 6 melee but we wanna hit all of them with PoH instead of just 5, now we can).

This could even make it useful for PVP too, where it's generally not very useful. Imagine having it be more useful in 3v3 arena because now you're not always wasting 40% of the throughput. Imagine being able to make adjustments in BGs on the fly based upon who happens to be defending a cap with you at the moment.

I think this solution keeps it with more or less the same flavor it has now, giving it a bit more flexibility (even if you ditch the dynamic group sizes), and it even involves a bit more decision making on the part of the Priest based on how he wants these private groups set up. The only part that seems to be a drawback is the UI element of how the Priest would go about setting up the groups. What do you all think?

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Danner, I don't think it would be that much work for developers, especially since the underlying parts of the UI would have to be implemented by Blizzard for the idea to work. VuhDo has something I think might be kind of similar to this already with private tanks, but I've never used the feature, so I can't say for sure.

The part I think that would be difficult would be actually moving the people around, but even then, I imagine "most" of the moving could be done via a UI akin to the current raid interface, and any rearranging you'd want to do on the fly could be done with a few macros that let you swap two people easily (eg, you can swap your target and your focus, or target and mouseover, move target from private group A to group B, or whatever).

Hell, even without this sort of change to PoH, I still think a sort of private group could be useful in general. If they completely get rid of groups as they exist now, they could still be used to assign roles to people in an encouter without having to worry about group specific buffs, which would be more useful than groups now for situations where a particular role doesn't need exactly 5 people (eg, Festergut, where each ranged group really only needs 4 people).

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

I like Zeuq suggestion too, in BGs would be really useful. If we are defending Lumber Mill with a hunter and warlock we could put them in the same group solving Prayer of Healing and Holy Nova restrictions.

However the intention behind changing Prayer of Healing is to redirect healer atention from green bars to the battleground, so I wouldn't expect a change that let priests regroup health bars.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Originally Posted by Zoros

NO WAY. I love Prayer of Healing is powerful, intelligent and fun to play, all of your suggestions will make the spell boring, overpowered or a copy of another spell with cooldown. Prayer of Healing restrictions make the spell fun.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

The argument that its fine as it is fails I think, because it is unreasonable that raid groups will reform for one person, out of a potential 25 as often as needs be done, especially since most other spells in this category have already moved to raid wide. The spell itself is also very similar to CoH, so much so that i think it seems like a third wheel.

Just throwing out a few ideas. They don't solve all problems, but I tried to limit it as much as I could. No, I haven't read every single blue post, so when criticizing, please don't do it harshly. Some ideas partially mentioned by previous posts. Thank you for inspiring ideas!

Purpose: To keep it interactive, remove the group requirement, and keep it unique, such that it does not tread on any other classes identified healing spell type.

Target Dependencies

-Casting the spell on a target that is buffed with renew, PW:S (or weakened soul), inspiration, or PoM causes it to heal for more, cost less (or both) than if you were to target a non buffed person.

-Divide the delivery vehicle of the heal by direct or HoT depending on the target's health, the overall health status of the raid, or some other variable, such as the status of the priest's mana.

-Heal based on the amount of inverse energy, rage, runic power, focus, or mana the target currently has.

Proc-based

-Cast a certain number or order of spells to, perhaps gain a charge you would use to cast the spell.

-Recently dealing a critical heal allows you to cast the spell, or buffs it in some way such that it would be too harsh to cast it in a different situation.

Environmental

-The priest chooses several targets before combat so that when PoH is casted, the spell casts smaller versions of the spell, centering on each target, dividing the range and power of each smaller version by the amount of friendly targets chosen.

-Greatly lessens the healing affect as you get farther from the target of the spell.

-Divide the delivery vehicle of the heal by direct or HoT based on the distance from the initial target. For example, those closer to the target would get direct healed for more, whereas those farther away would get healed over time, or vice versa. This would force the priest to target some area to hit those who are more in need of saving first.

-I know the cone in front of the healer hasnt been particularly encouraged, and it would be a drastic change for the spell, but considering the position of CoH, wouldnt be unreasonable change for PoH, since you cant hit yourself in a cone spell, and would be great for synergy with lifegrip, especially if it received additional chance to heal based on talents.

-Vary the range and power of the spell based on the status of the priest's mana, or some similar variable.

Other

-Turn it into a regeneration spell, buffing the entire raid, and placing a random chance to regenerate rage, energy, focus, runic power, or mana on the action of the players, or perhaps temporarily increasing healing taken, or healing power, damage, or defense in some manner. However, this would just be rotational, so to make it optimal, there would have to be some range or other requirement in place that limits the buff. This limiter may have the added affect of increasing the power of the temporary buff.

-Places a buff on targets it heals, such that it increases the amount healed on those targets temporarily, but is costly enough to not afford all the time.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Originally Posted by Deocri

-Places a buff on targets it heals, such that it increases the amount healed on those targets temporarily, but is costly enough to not afford all the time.

I like this idea. To make it costly, an infinite channel could provide the buff (the buff could even be increased stats or something other than +healing). But as you channel, along with not being able to provide additional healing during that time, additional mana ticks off at a rate which balances the buff(s) given. You could then change PoH to heal the lowest 5 raid members (keeping the cast time), and would make the spell even more dynamic since the players receiving the buff would not be able to be directly chosen by the priest.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Originally Posted by Aks

I like this idea. To make it costly, an infinite channel could provide the buff (the buff could even be increased stats or something other than +healing). But as you channel, along with not being able to provide additional healing during that time, additional mana ticks off at a rate which balances the buff(s) given. You could then change PoH to heal the lowest 5 raid members (keeping the cast time), and would make the spell even more dynamic since the players receiving the buff would not be able to be directly chosen by the priest.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Def get your point highangel, seems like every1's AoE & single target healing is being remade to easier spells or that new spells to make everything easier is coming. I hope they wont wreck the game too much, a lot of the things they are doing are on the verge of making the game too accesable and will make it easier to figure it out and harder to actually get something out of researching your class etc... hmm it could either turn out really bad or really good.. :O

Hoping for the best, at least they say that they are generally gonna make healing harder so we shouldn't complain.. even though more healing spells are aquired its prob cause we are gonna need em :P

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

I was thinking about making it a sort of large cone spell but the more I think about it the more problems I see with gathering on one spot and spreading out very thin.
It would be fun with a cone heal though as it wouldn't be possible to use as a whack-a-mole but demand moving around to have a good angle to cone people from.

Re: PoH Changes in Cataclysm

Originally Posted by Pregnant Orc

I was thinking about making it a sort of large cone spell but the more I think about it the more problems I see with gathering on one spot and spreading out very thin.
It would be fun with a cone heal though as it wouldn't be possible to use as a whack-a-mole but demand moving around to have a good angle to cone people from.